Culture

Lonnie G. Bunch III, the first black head of the Smithsonian Institution, is stepping down after a tenure of some seven years. NPR had the news: “In 2019, Bunch was named secretary of the Smithsonian, becoming the first historian and the first African American to hold the position.” The Wall Street Journal also got the memo: “The first Black historian to lead the world’s largest museum and research complex says he’s retiring and will leave by year’s end.” NBC looked behind the headline. “Bunch, the first Black person and first historian to lead the institution, has said he would have retired a year ago but felt he had to stay to defend the institution from the White House attacks, the person said.

John Galliano’s reign at Dior was before my time. But he was the first Brit to put his mark on a great French couture house and, in any way you care to look at it, he has been one of the most consequential figures in fashion for the past four decades. Which is why it felt right that the Metropolitan Museum in New York should announce it would be holding a show of his work, and why it felt wrong when they pulled the show earlier this week.  Galliano's star burned brightly until early 2011, when over the course of two months or so he came apart. There was a damning video of him in a Paris café, hissing at a woman about her “ugly Jewish face” and later telling a man he was a “f-king Asian bastard” he would kill.

It averaged a brutal 91 degrees this week in Cameron County, the southernmost tip of Texas, and a group dressed as the cast of O Brother, Where Art Thou have been there sweating away at something big. A colossal limbless torso is parked on the dunes and a head, suspended from a crane, is swaying very gently in an ocean breeze. There is the smell of metal and hot dust.  Pending some finishing touches and last-minute dabs of glue, this Atelier Missor’s Prometheus, soon to be unveiled at SpaceX’s Starbase launch site – standing contrapposto, torch aloft, bidding the rockets a comradely “Adieu!

“Do Tim Curry proud,” my friend Simon said to me when he heard I was writing about him. Simon is, admittedly, a Tim Curry fan extraordinaire whose go-to karaoke song is "I’m Going Home" from the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack, which Curry himself sang with mournful gravitas both on stage and in the 1975 film. Yet it also encapsulates the way in which the actor and singer, who has died aged 80, became an extraordinarily beloved part of the pop cultural landscape and remained that way for decades. Even a debilitating stroke in 2012, which forced him into a wheelchair and largely ended his on-screen career, could not damage the Englishman’s inimitable reputation as someone who made audiences laugh – a lot – and, when the occasion arose, tantalized or terrified them as well.

“And try to make the most of every moment / ’Cause if you never try, you never win.” There are few more appropriate lines with which to begin an obituary of Dolly Parton, although they do have the slight disadvantage of sounding like something that might be printed on an especially tawdry greetings card. Dolly – always Dolly, never ‘Ms Parton’ – was never particularly concerned about that sort of thing. She understood that sincerity was generally more effective than sophistication, and that if something was true there was little point in making it sound cleverer than it was. She was the greatest singer of her generation, the female Elvis if you will, and she was damned if anyone was ever going to persuade her otherwise.

The Tupac murder trial has finally begun. A 63-year-old former gang leader, Duane “Keffe D” Davis, is accused of orchestrating the murder of rapper, actor, and activist Tupac Shakur in a drive-by shooting 30 years ago. Tupac’s reputation – both alive and since – is chequered to say the least. Some still perceive him as one of a cadre of thugs who glorified gun violence and the gang lifestyle in the 1990s (if you’ve ever heard the phrase “Thug Life,” that’s one of his). Others have continued a campaign of quasi-canonization, presenting him as a tortured poet struggling against the strictures of fate. The latter argument gradually won through, with Tupac now closing in on Princess Diana in the global “national treasure” stakes.

China will inherit Homer, and not because the Communist party has decided to take him. The evidence arrived last week in Beijing, where a doctoral candidate in political theory named Yiyang Zhuge sat down with Christopher Nolan to talk about The Odyssey. She reads Greek and has translated Plutarch’s Moralia into Chinese. She learned her Greek in the United States. Zhuge told Nolan that the concept of atonement does not exist in Greek culture, in the Greek language, or in Homer’s Odyssey. It is in the film. Then she asked him: “Did you Christianize the Odyssey?” Nolan said he had focused on xenia, the ancient obligation between host and guest. As for atonement, he said it was “what we bring as viewers to the story,” and that he had not intended to Christianize the poem.

In 1899 Jack London, beginning his career as a writer, sold a story to Atlantic Monthly for $120. Drawing on his experiences during the Klondike gold rush and on the Yukon River, it was a tale of an Aleutian native wandering the Arctic for years on end in search of his wife, who had been stolen by a powerful Nordic sea captain. London titled his saga, “An Odyssey of the North.

In a country full of brilliant food, the Garden Night Market in sultry Tainan, southwest Taiwan, is still a standout: a cheerful riot of steam, umami, deep-fried tofu and loud, vivacious chatter. Families drift past in loose formation, grandparents hefting toddlers with fruit ices, flirting teenagers orbiting bubble-tea stalls, couples sharing hot skewers of squid, pork and chicken gizzards. Almost everyone plays lurid and inexplicable games involving teddy bears and claw machines. I eat sublime oyster omelettes slick with sweet chili pepper sauce, then hot soup dumplings that collapse into scalding, savory bliss. Someone presses popcorn chicken into my hand. It is dangerously moreish. The next morning, Tainan feels sun-blessed and unhurried.